Oostburg CRC v

 

Nothing changed the church or the nation like the events begun in August of 1914, with the First World War. It took three years for the United States of America to become wholly engaged in “the Great War,” but when finally, troops shipped off to France, war itself changed the nation and the Oostburg Christian Reformed Church like nothing else because for better or worse, it was now officially and powerfully vital for a Dutch bunch to become American. Old Highway 32, I believe, was named after one of Wisconsin’s most tried-and-true World War I divisions.

Ninety-four Sheboygan County Doughboys never returned from “the war to end all wars,” probably half of them victims of conflict, the other half of various forms of influenza that became a world-wide epidemic

One of them, as I’ve already said, was my Great Uncle, pictured here with is brother-in-law and my grandpa Dirkse, Harry, the blacksmith who ran a gas station when farm horses disappeared. Note the downtown Oostburg CRC behind them on Center Avenue, a mud road, that sports horse rails.

Grandpa’s wife, Edgar’s sister, my Grandma learned to recite the Heidelberg Catechism, but, she told me, giggling, in the Dutch language, a language she couldn’t really understand. I tell that story because nothing changed language like the First World War, when one CRC soldier wrote home that he was angry about the fact that, when on the battlefield, at night he understood the whispers coming from the German trenches better than the English of his buddies from New York City or Alabama. When boys like that came back, they were conscious, maybe for the first time, that they were Americans, not Hollanders.

Gerrit VerVelde, 25 years old, a private in the 59^th infancy, was killed in action near Marne, Argonne Forest, almost 100 years ago today, September 30, 1918  And look what I found in an old Sheboygan County book.

    By the time the Thirties came around, things had changed substantially, even though I’m sure Oostburg CRC still fought about language. There were, of course, bigger problems—the American Depression affected city life and farm country. In Oostburg, no one had any money.  

    My paternal grandparents moved here, Grandpa into the pulpit, in 1932, the worst of times.  

    That’s my father on the far left. He passed what the catechism used to call “the age of discretion” here in Oostburg, his adolescence, and, obviously, married an Oostburg girl, who grew up across the street from the parsonage, right downtown.

 My grandmother Schaap wrote her relatives about the town in a simple but loving hand.

    The preacher’s family was poor, but then so was everyone else. My father claimed there really was no salary to speak of, no money coming in; but what helped the family along was vegetables and meat and canned goods from farmer families, church members. Food would be left on the parsonage porch by people who cared but didn’t need to be identified.

Both mom’s and dad’s families, during the Depression, were less than a block from the railroad, which meant getting hit up by hobos hitching rides, hither and yon, throughout the country, most of them looking for work, all of them looking for something to eat.

    Across the street and down the block from the parsonage sat the blacksmith shop/gas station. In the height of the Great Depression, Grandpa Dirkse would come up the stairs to the kitchen some nights, sit over a bowl of soup or a slice of bread with cheese, put his head in his hands, and cry. My mom was just a kid, but no kid forgets her father’s tears.

There was no money, period. Farmers would come in for shoeing or to get their shares sharpened, or for fuel oil, and look at him sorrowfully. They couldn’t pay. His dilemma was profound. He couldn’t go on without an income; his family wouldn’t be fed. But neither could he turn down what the farmers needed or their families wouldn’t eat. There were no bucks in big empty leather wallets.